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Our market runs throughout the year and is proud to sell 100% New Zealand-made items. Set in a beautiful waterfront location in Earnslaw Park, in this vibrant area, visual and performing arts come together for the public to enjoy

Proudly Selling 100% New Zealand-made items!

Handcrafted soaps Soapernatural skin care products are handcrafted on the shores of Lake Wakatipu in Kingston. Most of its soaps are coloured naturally and uses clays, spices, herbs, plant, and flower extracts in its products, many of which are grown in the seller’s own Read More ...

One of the pleasures of any trip to New Zealand is a step into the extraordinary. Here, where the wilderness is still wild, the coastline rocky and rugged, and the great outdoors still great, the locals have their own sense of splendor, Read More ...

There’s no such thing as a roadmap or guide when we talk about entrepreneurship because different company’s also has different paths to follow. On the other hand, you can learn a lot from people who’s higher than you, or those people who’ve fallen but rose back up.

Entrepreneurship is a challenging task that takes a lot of hard work and dedication in order to get to the top. If you’re already in business or planning to start a business, then this article is for you. Let’s dive in to these top 10 business tips for a successful future.

Be significant

Success is not something that can be achieved easily. Instead of worrying about being unsuccessful, try working to be significant. Think of ways that can make you and your business significant. Success will find its way to you at the end of the day as long as you love doing your work. Find your purpose, know your passion, and everything will fall into place.

Learn to love what you do

You’re probably the luckiest person alive if you found a career that’s in line with your skills and passion. But there are times that you’ll end up in a career that’s miles away from your own passion. Think of it like getting married, you don’t want to get into bed with someone you don’t love. However, it’s okay to try out different businesses before finding the right one. You never know, maybe your destiny lies in that particular business all along.

Let people know about your business

No matter what type of business you’re doing, if you have no customers to begin with, then there’ll be no sales. It’s important to get people to see your products and services. In order to gain people, you must learn how to be good in marketing. There are a lot of business out there which is terribly bad but became successful because of great marketers behind it. On the other hand, some really good businesses are sometimes overlooked because of bad marketers. Know how to market your business wisely and let profit come to you.

Plan

Plan acts as a guide to your business. By planning properly, you’ll be able to track your progress and see areas where your business is not doing good enough and make changes to it. No need to make your plan complex and complicated. Make it modest, realistic, relaxing, and most of all, attainable.

Make education as a priority

The key to success is to never stop learning. Think you’re done learning when you graduated college? No! You must continue learning and expand your knowledge on things even though you’re already a professional. Put education on top of your priority list and see where it can lead you.

Life is unfair

Whatever you do and no matter how hard you work in your life, there will always be times where life will bring you down even though you already did your best. We can’t control how life goes on. They say change is constant but it’s also inevitable. Don’t worry if things didn’t go your way. If life brings you down, then stand up again and make yourself better this time. If you don’t know how to rise up during these moments, then success is not meant for you.

Emulate instead of re-create

Don’t fix what’s not broken. If you see a product perfectly working in someone else’s business, then let it be. There are a lot of business models, software, and system that work for a specific reason. Don’t waste time on building something new if a certain piece of technology that’s known to work is already there since the start.

Commitment is important

Entering the world of entrepreneurship and starting a business means you have to commit to it because you started it in the first place. What’s the point of committing into something that you’ll just leave it in the end right? If you’re still not ready yet, then it’s better to wait. You’re going to have a rough time succeeding when you aren’t fully committed.

Life is the best teacher of all time

It’s not your university or the college you graduated in. Life is the real mentor here. Experience is one way of learning and discovering something new. No matter how many books you’ve read, learning from experience is what makes us whole.

Learn from your mistakes

We mentioned above that experience is the best teacher, and part of that experience is creating mistakes. Mistakes are normal and unavoidable. And you should never let mistakes be a hindrance to your goal. Once you made a mistake, use it as a stepping stone to achieve your goal. This will help you know what’s wrong and what’s right just in case it will happen again. What’s important is you should keep a positive attitude about it and don’t let it block you from moving on.

If you’re looking for motivation from other people or particularly from the internet, then you’re doing it wrong. Entrepreneurs especially the newbies, should know that motivation comes from within and not from others.

There are two types of sources where we can find motivation: External and Internal. For example, try putting your hand on a fire and you’ll quickly gain motivation to pull your hand back because it’s hot. Now that’s what we call external motivation. But for entrepreneurs, there are only a few external factors that can motivate them.

There might be a few external sources to motivate entrepreneurs such as doing a quick Google search for motivational material. But keep in mind that it’s not the material that’s motivating you, it’s you all along who chose to be self-motivated.

So what are the factors of a “self-motivated” entrepreneur? We have:

The entrepreneur who knows what he/she wants and has a plan to attain it.

The entrepreneur that’s mentally and physically prepared to face each challenge that may come its way.

The entrepreneur who makes their own rules.

And lastly, the entrepreneur who has goals that’s far beyond a human’s imagination.

As you can see, there’s no such thing as luck. All was already laid out and planned inside our heads. We just need to make these plans into action to attain our goals.

Today, we’re going to give 6 motivational tips for aspiring entrepreneurs to help them achieve their goals along the way. Let’s start!

Keep track of numbers

Digging deeper to the numbers you’ve tracked can help you stay motivated on your business. Set goals how much profit you need daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly and see if these goals are met or not. Take it to the extreme by going a bit higher and see if you can reach that goal. Add all of these numbers up and make ways how to complete that goal.

Use your past as a motivation

If you have a terrible past, use it to motivate yourself to keep moving forward. Think of the past where you’re working in an office even though you don’t love your work just for the sake of making a salary. Or the time where you’re struggling to pay for your house rent or car loan. You might experience any obstacles along the way but the important thing is you have to keep moving.

Take on the most difficult tasks

If you ever feel unmotivated, try doing hard tasks and see where it can take you. By doing so, you will be focused on the task that you even forgot that you dreaded it at first. Once you finish the task, you’ll then realize that you just motivated yourself.

Do exercises

If you feel that you’re not in the mood to be motivated, try going to the gym and work out that body. You can also do jogging, walking, and even biking if going to the gym seems like kind of a chore for you. Doing such exercises can awaken your motivational chromosomes.

Stay positive

Surround yourself with positive things around you. Download inspirational pictures or put up pictures of your loved ones in your desk. Call your best friend if you need some company and have a little chit chat before doing your work.

Learn something new

Learning is the key to succeed in business. It can also help spike up your motivation too because you have learned something new. Don’t stop being curious in a lot of things. Try and try until you learn and you’ll find yourself being motivated at the end of the day.

Practicing self-motivation can turn into a habit in the long run. You’ll find yourself not giving up easily even though something bad happens. You’re unstoppable just like time, it keeps on ticking forever and ever. We cannot escape the fact that the road is rough sometimes especially in the world of business. But as long as you know how to motivate yourself, you’ll be ready for whatever life

Managing your time is the thing entrepreneurs should always keep in mind. It’s understandable that being busy is a part of an entrepreneur’s life, but how can one be productive to get more things done during the day? If you want to be an effective and productive entrepreneur, here are 5 important tips you should follow.

Use tools to automated your social media

Social media is a great place to advertise your content, product, business, and more. But due to our busy schedule, we don’t even have time to check our social media anymore. So how can we advertise without doing any extra work on social media? One thing to do is to automate your social media. Tools like “Post Planner” and “Tailwind” can help you automate your posts so you don’t have to do it by yourself anymore.

Categorize your work by batches

They said multitasking can help you get more work done, no it’s not. You’ll eventually lose your productivity while doing so because you’re doing different kinds of work in one sitting. Instead, batch your work by category to help you organize and see what needs to be done first. Instead of cramming all different kinds of work in one day, why don’t you just do a particular job this day and do another one tomorrow. This enables you to get more things done faster compared to multitasking.

Give yourself a break

It’s better to do your work really hard for a few hours and get all things done before you take a break. This can make you really productive compared to the usual break intervals in each work. Work all-out for an ample amount of time and then reward yourself by taking an all-out rest until your next task.

Keep away from distractions

Things such as your smartphone or your social media can slow you down from working. Instead, put your smartphone out of reach from you to avoid using it while working. As for social media, you can use a tool like the free “Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator” to block your newsfeed for a while to prevent yourself from checking it from time to time.

Outsource tedious and time-consuming tasks

If you do happen to have a task that’s boring, repetitive, and overall time-consuming, then consider hiring a virtual assistant to do them for you. This enables you to save time for doing tasks that matters the most.

New Year is fast approaching. So expect to have a new set of resolutions you’ve failed to do before, and then fail again for the upcoming year. Instead of thinking of ways how we can do better, let’s make a simple plan instead. An effective one.

The key to success is doing action. And for entrepreneurs, this is kind of a big deal for them. So how can we be successful in business for the year to come? Here are 4 tips for entrepreneurs to have a successful new year!

Stop overusing Jargon words

A lot of businesses these days tend to use unnecessary buzzwords to advertise their products. This can be misleading sometimes especially if your product is miles different than the way you described it by using such words. Rami Essaid, CEO and co-founder of Distil Networks said that using jargon inhibits your communication with the consumers and just ends up making you sound like everyone else. This is something you should definitely avoid of.

Do a lot of networking

Social and Learning combined is crucial when it comes to networking. Hard work and motivation are important ingredients for the recipe of success as well as socializing. You need to step up your game in socializing people in order to gain consumers. Don’t just “meet and greet” people out in the open, you need to know them personally too as it can help you throughout your business. You can also build new friendships in the long run while doing so.

Learn your industry

Learning everything about the industry you’re working in is important when it comes to business. Not just your industry, but you also need to learn about your competitors too. Always keep a lookout on the top trends around the world so you can create ideas base on it. Create buyer personas and pretend that you’re your very own customer. The more you learn, the more productive and knowledgeable you can be in your business.

Use internships and mentor-ships to your advantage

Young professionals such as fresh graduates especially college students can take advantage of this. Although some of them didn’t grab such opportunity because of little pay, the important thing is that you can learn a lot while interning. You can meet a lot of people who has the same field as you too when engaging such. Internships can also help you understand how the industry works. Not just that, you can also easily apply for a full-time job knowing you already had the experience while being an intern.

Financial handling is very important for your business. Off course you’ll experience any mistakes on the way while managing such, but think of this as a lesson where you can learn and make changes. In this article, you’ll find 14 important tips you should follow to avoid any improper financial management that can ruin your business.

Educate yourself about accounting

Don’t underestimate the power of education. To learn more about financial handling, educate yourself by taking accounting courses. For sure there are lots of accounting courses in your community college, but you can also look it up online if you want to learn at home.

You must be aware of how everything works in financing even though you have professional accountants handling your business.

Organize your financial papers

Organizing all your financial papers is definitely a must. Each paper such as tax forms and bank statements must have their own files. Just in case you’ll run into trouble about financial matters, you can easily find the answer because you organized everything.

Use negotiation tactics

Negotiating is the key to be successful in business. There are a lot of competitors in the market striving hard to get customers, some of them might even undercut you and your prices. This is perfectly normal in the world of business so you should always ready yourself by negotiating with each vendors you use.

Find the right bank that can benefit your financial needs

Finding the perfect bank that can benefit not just you but also your financial needs is important. Off course you have to choose wisely when selecting one, because there are other banks out there that has terrible customer service. You don’t want to experience that right?

Protect yourself

You’re the VIP of your own business. So it’s important to take care of yourself and also your health. What if you suddenly die? Who will take care all of it? Do you have insurance to cover these situations?

Pay yourself

Just like we mentioned above that you’re the very important person of your own business, you must pay yourself. Paying yourself is important even though you’re spending most of your money by inventing more in your business.

Automate bill payments

“Busy” is a word that entrepreneurs carry every day. With so many business related things to do, there’s so little time to do anything else. But what if you have bill payments that are due? How can you pay them while you’re on your busy schedule? This is where automated bill payments come into play. With the help of automated bill payments, say goodbye to stress from seeing those papers filled with bills on your home.

Save money for your retirement

There will always come a time that we would retire because of old age. Having a retirement fund is a good idea so that you can have a small percentage of your money when the time comes.

Diversity

Diversifying your investment is crucial in any business. You need to find other investments that can act as back-ups just in case the other ones aren’t working well.

Open a lean account

Having a lean account can save you from trouble just in case something terrible happens that is unforeseen financially.

Learn how to budget

Budget your business plans for the whole week or even per month. It’s wise to budget not just on your personal needs, but also for your business needs.

Separate personal finances to business finances

Separating them from each other can save you from trouble of spending your cash unwisely. It can be tempting to purchase something for yourself by using your business credit card and this is something you should definitely avoid.

Hire a professional

Having a personal bookkeeper or accountant in your business can help you save time and reduce stress.

Use an accounting software

There’s nothing bad by doing all these tips by yourself. But using an accounting software is much easier and can benefit you a lot. “The Expense Tracker” is a great software that business people will surely enjoy. It’s packed with a lot of features that can help you be wise on managing finances in your business.

Having an office is extremely useful especially if there are two or more people in your business. Lots of business incubators provides an office space that comes with a variety of packages. Some of them includes a single office with a phone which can also give you a mailing address. But why is it important to invest for an office? Here are 3 reasons why:

Accountability – Having an office gives you a much clearer idea of how long people are working and what they’re actually doing. You’ll be able to track your employee and see why some of them are gone missing for a while. Are they actually busy on handling clients? Or they just didn’t show up at work at all? With an office, it’s much easier to tell which one you’ll fire and which one you’ll reward based on their performance.

Team Building – Yeah sure you can do team building online by group chats on Messenger or Skype. But team building while your employees are far away is worlds different than team building face to face. By having an office, team building is easier since all of you are gathered together in a single place. This prevents mistrust and miscommunication to happen that are usually found in online team buildings.

Be Able to Remove Redundant Things Out of the Way – Moving into an office makes you realize that there’s a lot of junk that your business has made that’s not important anymore. By having an office, you can easily remove redundancy not just in your workplace, but also in your life.

If you’re still not convinced, then ask your employees what you can do to make their working lives easier. Are they working effectively at their homes? Do you know what kind of environment they want to work in? If you do ask, they’ll probably answer that they want to work in an office. So what are you waiting for? Start getting an office today!

One way to make your business grow is by prospecting. There are a lot of ways to do prospecting, some of them are right, and some of them are wrong. So what are we going to do to improve our prospecting goals?

To start, there are 3 levels of prospects that you should keep in mind:

Cold – prospects within your target market that’s not familiar with you or your business.

Warm – prospects that you’ve approached and have been qualified.

Hot – prospects that have shown interest in you or your business.

The tips found below are useful for each level of prospects, but some of them needs to be adapted well in order to fit in such prospect level. Anyways, let’s get it on with the tips.

Create a plan

Creating a plan is a recipe for success. Without a plan, you’ll be going nowhere just like a boat going upstream without a paddle, rendering it useless. Creating a plan for each prospect level is the best thing to do.

Think of it as a challenge for yourself

This tip is best combined with tip #1. Set your goals higher than it was before and think of it as a challenge for both you and your business. And at the end of the day, reward yourself once you meet those goals.

Use a script

Scripts acts as a guide to help you keep on track. Using a script also means you’re less likely to get mistakes. If you see something on the script that’s a bit off, make changes to it when needed. But does this mean you have to read it word by word? The answer is no. Don’t just stand there acting like a robot while reading your script. Just follow the basic premise of the script and you’ll be on track.

Educate instead of selling

This is one aspect most business people failed to do. Instead of educating a consumer, most business people tried to force people to buy their product without even caring on what the customer thinks about it as long as it sells. Let’s think of a situation. You walk inside an automobile shop and you’re canvasing for cars. Then a salesperson approached you and convinces you to buy a car. Without listening to your words, the salesperson keeps on saying why a car is the right choice for you. Few days have passed, another salesperson approached you. But this time, instead of forcing you, the salesperson educated you about the dangers of having cars and why you should think wisely when getting one. Now who do you think is an effective seller? Obviously, the second one right? Now that’s a proper way to do business.

Know your product

This is the key to make your product sell well in the market. What if a prospect suddenly approaches you and asks about your product, and you’re just standing there brain dead trying to figure out how to answer his/her question. We don’t want that to happen right? That’s why it’s important to study and know about your product to avoid any unfortunate circumstances from happening.

Grab it while it’s hot

If you get a prospect lead, then approach them as early as possible. Don’t just wait for days to come before you decide to approach them. It’s better to grab the opportunity as early as possible or else your competitor will.

Snail mail

Going old school is the key to approach prospects. While others are using email or calling their prospects via telephone, there’s nothing better than doing the old-fashioned handwritten mail and get a serve of nostalgia.

Do your research

It will be easier for you if you do a research of your prospects first before approaching them. With the help of technology and internet, a simple Google search can help you find information of a particular prospect. If they have a website, then go check it out. It’s also a good thing to check out their social media too such as Facebook or Twitter and most especially LinkedIn.

Don’t be afraid of getting rejected

Rejection is perfectly normal in the world of business. If a prospect says no, then learn how to accept it instead of getting mad or going full rage mode. Every “no” has a reason behind that will eventually turn into a “yes” in the end.

Don’t quit just because of an objection

Just because it’s always “no” doesn’t mean you’ll never have a chance to get a “yes”. If you like to take risk, you can attempt to rebut the first “no” that you received. Not every “no” is an objection, maybe the prospect just need more information about your business before they’ll accept it. You can try asking questions and rebut the objection so that you’ll know the other side of the story why they rejected it.

Making mistakes is normal

In the world of entrepreneurship, making mistakes is normal. But don’t let this mistake drag you down. Think of it as a lesson and use it as a stepping stone to progress towards your goal.

At the end of the day, the important thing to note is just to have fun. As long as you enjoy what you’re doing and you’re keeping your business alive and well, prospects will probably notice you and they’ll be the one to approach you in the long run.

Entering the world of business is a challenge. You may be thinking that you could be successful someday, seeing your business on different zines and newspapers around the globe. In your vision, you see yourself as a successful person with a blooming business because you poured your heart and soul into it.

Now let’s snap back to reality. Does that vision of yours became true? Or is it just all inside your head? Is your current business right now working well for you? Or you’re just working just for the sake of it because you have no other choice.

Failure is normal in the business world. We’ve all been there. Those days where you just want to snuggle up in your bed and cry, thinking why you’ve started something that just turned out as a failure in the end. It’s okay to quit if that’s your final choice, but there are other ways to resolve that problem. Here are 3 options you can do.

Just Quit

If you feel like losing hope already, you can just finally quit and put it to rest. But before doing so, take a look of your life and ask yourself on how would it be without your business.

Are there any bills to pay?

What changes do you think will happen?

What would you do without it?

But if you already decided that you should really quit because everything is not going well, or you’ve genuinely grown to resent your business, then let it go. Some businesses are meant to die especially when it already outlived its usefulness. The more you push it harder to keep it alive, the more damage will be done on your health, wealth, and spirit.

It’s Time to Sell It

If you don’t feel like quitting, then it’s time to sell your business and put it into good hands. Selling a business is hard to look at. It’s like giving up something you love because you know they will be better without you.

So what happens when we put our business for sale? It’s like looking it from the perspective of an outsider, thinking of ways how to improve it and see what changes needs to be done. So what are we waiting for? Let’s get it on by following these important steps.

Prepare the books – and I mean all of them! From vendor invoices to balance sheets, all of these needs to be reconciled into one place. Next, look for the detailed expenses on the income statement. Cross out those expenses that aren’t beneficial for the business so that there won’t be any unimportant clutter left behind.

Look for your “To do” lists – and gather them all into one place. See which of these “tasks” can provide the most impact on the business with the least amount of work. Make use of the important ones and create a plan for the buyer so that everything is laid out and ready to go.

Document your processes – every single one of them. If you don’t have any, then this might be the reason why your business is going downhill. The reason behind this is so that you can find more opportunities for improvement.

Get a valuation – and don’t ever do it before you get all your books, paperworks and documents. Doing so will make brokers more eager to talk to you and raise your valuation if you happen to have any ideas for supporting the next owner of your business.

Keep Going

If the first two options didn’t suit your taste, then it’s time to stop crying and step out of your bed and keep going even though it’s hard. Well, it won’t be hard as long as you know how to do it well.

Look at the second option and complete steps 1-3. Instead of going to step number 4 where your business is ready for selling, get a coach or mentor instead that can help you improve your business. It’s going to be costly to be honest, but the return on investment is worth it.

Having a coach can help you reach your goals. Not just goals like earning a 100 grand a year, they’ll help you dig deeper than that. Coaches can help you to take action to things that matter the most for your business. And at the end of the day, you’ll see your business rising back up again and ready to compete in the market. As long as you’re consistent on pursuing your goals, your vision will eventually come to reality.

The reason why we are doing business is to gain profit. Speaking of profit, it must be a “clean” profit. What that means is that the customers must get what they’ve paid for, so they can feel every cent they spent money on a particular product is worth it.

Some other companies however, have been doing dirty tricks to fool customers. Using unclean ways which enables them to gain big profits while cutting costs at the same time. Which is by taking away the original quality of a product.

This is not the right way on how to become profitable, this will only damage your brand and also its reputation. To help you maximize profit into your business, here are 5 tips for you to follow.

Remove activities that doesn’t have any value to the customer/company

To help you with this, list all the activities that are performed on a normal day in your business. After that, take time to analyze each activities and see if it values to the customer, company, or both. If you happen to find an activity that doesn’t value both parties, consider removing them to save time and money which will lead to more profit.

Increase the price by 2%

Consumers understand why a company or business has to increase their price occasionally. But be sure to raise it only a little bit more, not drastically increasing it which will make your product expensive. This will result to your product not able to compete well in the market. Raising the price by 2% will do.

Know your return on investment with each resource

If you’re planning to contract a person, or purchase machinery or combine it with a piece of software, you should definitely check the Return On Investment (ROI) before doing such. Maybe you need it or maybe not. It’s better to do a trial run first and see if it actually benefits your business. If it’s not, then scrap it. There’s no point in investing something that won’t do any profit in return.

Cross/Up selling

Cross selling and up selling must be included in your business to gain more profit. But be sure to do it right and don’t scam your customers. For example, if you’re a barber on a barber shop you can offer your customer a clean wash and blow dry for only $2, this is called up selling. And when everything is finished and your customer is ready to pay, offer him the best-selling shampoo and conditioner which is only 5% off for every purchase of haircut, this is called cross selling. Implementing this kind of technique can definitely make your profits soar high.

Implement a customer loyalty program

Having a customer loyalty program not only just increase your profits, but you can also gain more customers too. For example, you have a product that has a buy 5 and get 1 free deal. This will make customers to come back again and again which leads to more profit.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you might be wondering how to be successful in your business. There are 2 words that entrepreneurs should keep in mind to make it to the top: Innovation and Creativity. In this article, we’re going to explore 7 tips on how to be an innovative entrepreneur. Let’s check them out!

Curiosity is key

Don’t be afraid when curiosity strikes. It’s one way of learning and discovering new ways to interact on things. For example, you want to know how a particular device works, tore it apart and learn how it operates. Make sure that you memorized how to put it back though.

Stick to one idea

If you have an idea running into your mind and want to turn it into a reality, then go for it. However, if you have another idea while currently doing your first idea, then it’s better to put all your attention to the first idea and focus on it. Save the other one for later and finish what needs to be done first.

Flexibility is a must

Change is inevitable and it’s important that you have to be flexible in order to cope up with it. Learn to listen on what your client wants and be willing to change to meet their expectations. You will be rewarded at the end of the day.

Keep up of today’s trends

The world revolves around people following what’s popular. It’s better to create your ideas by following the current trends so that consumers will enjoy your output. Keep up with the news and always stay in touch with what’s happening in the world.

Know both sides of the story

As an entrepreneur, you must know how to see both sides of the story so that you can find ways how to solve an issue that will benefit both parties. Don’t just stick to the former just because they sound convincing, you never know what struggle the latter is going through.

Lead from the front

This saying is common in the military which also works when it comes to entrepreneurship too. It means you are willing to jump in and do the task instead of waiting what time will do to progress. Remember, creative ideas are always found in the front.

Know your strengths

A wise entrepreneur knows their strongest and weakest points. Remember, you’re not a superhero that can do anything at your disposal. Focus on your strengths and let people who are strong in your weak areas do the work down there.

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One of the pleasures of any trip to New Zealand is a step into the extraordinary. Here, where the wilderness is still wild, the coastline rocky and rugged, and the great outdoors still great, the locals have their own sense of splendor, and this can be seen in the artfully crafted curios on display at Queenstown’s Arts and Crafts Market.